Well, yippee! After 14 weeks you can ditch your Grim Visage and go human on the tots.

I could never do Grim Visage. It used to slip in the first week. A joke, a blubbing first-year cherub, a stuttering doe-eyed illiterate and I'd find myself smiling.

Wrong!

"You're not their friend, you're not there to be liked."

Yeah. Yeah.

"Smile and you're doomed. Softness is weakness – they smell it, like sharks."

Yeah. Yeah.

The Macho Freeze was all the go. My old management would stroll down the corridors like Reservoir Clots, with cropped skulls and dead eyes and cancelled smiles. They'd point their Armanis at us all and dish out the Stare.

Relishing tots' fear, Mr Vholes, with his reptilian peeled-egg head, perfected a testicle-shrinking grimace. There's a name for his condition. Narcissist Personality Disorder. Zero Degrees of Empathy. Psychosis. Pillock's Syndrome. It's all about control and little else.

My old geography teacher, Mr Morgan, his visage ravaged with whiskey and rage, would thunder: "Wipe that smile off your face! See that blood on the walls, boy? That could be you!"

Marvellous. I got 7% in the geography exam, for knowing three great lakes, and one trade wind. I thought Caracas was just off Bognor.

I was willing to give Grim Visage a go. I'd try the Sir Alex. The in-your-face harangue known as The Hairdryer. I'd essay guitarist Wilco Johnson's legendary Stare.

Did it work? Fat chance.

Why not? Fat face.

When I did wrath, I resembled a four-eyed, boiling owl. This never cut it with the less sensitive inmates, who collapsed with cheap mirth.

I did too. I got the giggles. Schoolboy and schoolgirl humour can be murderously funny. I recall Seth and Rhapsody, having canoodled in a sixth-form pond, arriving dishevelled to my DH Lawrence class, dripping with dank foliage and pond life. How we larfed.

This prune-faced stuff seems even more the rage now. It's craven – and depressing. You can't cancel your humanity and teach – especially English, which trades in the more tender empathies and ambiguities.

Good teaching takes risks, requires courage and, above all, humour. So don't wipe that smile off your face. It could be Christmas in the classroom all year long.